You won’t believe this, but Smallfoot, a cartoon about isolationist yetis, packs quite the anti-religious and anti-Trump punch. It is practically a version of Nineteen Eighty-Four adorably (abominably?) rewritten from children. Don’t worry, snowflake MAGA parents. Your authoritarian dogma walls are unlikely to be penetrated; for all its progressive spunk, Smallfoot just wasn’t that memorable.
Somewhere at the top of the Himalayas, there is a tribe of giant-sized yetis. These primate-like beasts have evolutionarily worked their way up to religious myth stage – they have language and society and cooperation, yet they have the scientific understanding of Flat Earthers and explain everything in arbitrary pictographs (“the sun is giant snail crawling through the heavens who awakens every morning by a big gong”). These myths along with the tribe’s governmental laws have been transferred to stones; the stones are never to be questioned. Also, the stones have been woven in to a tunic worn by the tribal leader (voice of Common).
Sorry, there’s a lot to unpack, huh? The Stonekeeper is literally weighed down by the laws [read: lies] of the community. This is a near perfect metaphor for Senate Republicans, marching into their battleground wearing the Constitution like a three-piece suit. [Maybe I shouldn’t give these guys any ideas; if Trump-voting douchebags ever get the idea that “libtards” can be pissed off by wearing a Constitution suit and a Confederate flag tie, you know that’s going to be the Bible Belt fashion rage for a generation or two.] And think of how wonderful that metaphor is for describing the inflexibility and lack of compromise of the group as a whole. Just like the stones for the yetis, our Constitution was written at a time so long and backwards ago that slavery was matter-of-fact, yet any who dares suggest it’s time for an upgrade is called a traitor. Yup. That’s exactly where we are.
The yetis believe that there is nothing beyond their cloud mountaintop. If you go down, there is just blackness. Just in case, going down is forbidden, as is questioning what’s actually down there, as is imaging the question of what might be down there, as is … Anyway, to keep the li’l yetis in line, there is the legend of the mythic beast “Smallfoot” or humans as we might call them.
Migo (Channing Tatum) has the honor of taking over for dad’s sunrise gong-ringing duties. For years, dad (Danny DeVito) has gotten up just before the sun and launched himself in a giant crossbow headfirst towards a distant gong. During a practice launch, Migo misses the gong, but finds a small crash-landed airplane and, lo-and-behold, it’s human inhabitant, Smallfoot! “Everybody has to know Smallfoot exists!” Son, you just cannot wait for banishment, can you? What do you suppose is worse? Pretending a group of people don’t exist … or knowing that they do and badmouthing them to keep them away –maybe even building a big wall to do so?
As the “protective” lies of the yetis are intermingled myth and authoritarian law, there seems little question that this film is intended as an attack on the dogma of the MAGA community. Of course, the metaphor isn’t all perfect; Smallfoot needed some small touches like industrious yetis all happily creating avalanches that erode their own environment and unwittingly destroy the villages down below. Or … wait, even better, how about creating a yeti justice council that deliberately excludes female yetis and executes any yeti who accuses an elder of wrongdoing regardless of proof? Now that would really be poignant.
At the end of the snail-path-through-the-heavens, Smallfoot didn’t actually want to be much of a political satire; it just wanted some interaction between humans and yetis. See, it’s funny because giant yetis are afraid of tiny humans. Isn’t that a riot? And look, it turns out we’re all just people, right? Well, some of us are stone-bearing, rock-headed, isolationistic monsters, and some of us are just friendly yetis. It doesn’t matter; the humor wasn’t fantastic, the gimmick of yetis searching for us is negligible, and the characters were pretty forgettable. In other words, this picture might give a fun ride for an impressionable mind, but will quickly be forgotten like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
♪Oh give me some stones weighing down my bones
To describe our milieu each day
They’ll talk of our plight, and together we’ll write
There can be no alternative way
Stones, stones way up there
Where life is always unfair
Where seldom is heard
A dissenting word
Cuz none here endures “Au contraire”♫
Rated PG, 96 Minutes
Director: Karey Kirkpatrick and Jason Reisig
Writer: Karey Kirkpatrick and Clare Sera
Genre: Political metaphor wasted on children
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Your open-minded six-year-old
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: MAGA
♪ Parody Inspired by “Home on the Range”
